Tom Schaller Gets it Partly Right

Tom Schaller at the formidable Five Thirty Eight serves up a whuppin' plate of clear-sighted wisdom on tea-baggers, although I don't think he gets it quite right:

Five months ago in this space, I speculated that this new conservative movement is fueled to a significant degree by a lot of ginned up former Ron Paul supporters. I mentioned and quoted at length from Dana Goldstein's fanstastic reporting that connected the Tea Party movement to residual Ron Paulites. When is the national media going to finally make these connections?

Instead, the kooky, historically revisionist, apocalyptic ideas of Glenn Beck and Ron Paul are treated with equivalency to those of the majority Democratic Party in Washington and--here's the key point--these movement activists and their ideas are often discussed without much mention of their connections to Beck or Paul. Beck earns his share of attention, granted. But there is almost no recognition whatsoever of the true origins of this conservative backlash. The movement is instead covered as if it is the somehow the byproduct and wind in the sails of national Republicans like Michael Steele, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, when in fact it is operating wholly independently of any or all of them. And remember that these are people who, as Nate pointed out earlier this month, believe that the president is a socialist Muslim interloper born in Africa; who, as I suspect, somehow think that earmark and tort reform will solve our deficit problems; and who, as we saw today, cheer without any sense of internal contradiction as Beck boasts about educating himself for "free" at a public library system paid for by the very taxes he complains about.

But go try to find much in the way of reporting on how closely connected these two movements are. Or how disconnected these people are from political reality. You won't find much. Because the media wants to provide competitive balance to its narrative, reporting to date has either willfully disconnected the Tea Party movement from the Ron Paul presidential campaign or it simply has not noticed.

There's great merit in all that. But take a second look at the critical sentence:

The movement is instead covered as if it is the somehow the byproduct and wind in the sails of national Republicans like Michael Steele, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, when in fact it is operating wholly independently of any or all of them.

Let's grant that the tea-partiers probably scare the daylights out of John Boehner just as they scare the daylight out of any sensible citizen. Still, the "leadership" (if you can call it that) hasn't the slightest disposition to disown the beast: they are merely scrambling to relearn the ancient game of which-way-are-my-people-going-so-I-can-run-out-in-front-and-lead-them. Distasteful as they may find all this poisoned looniness, they know it's the only party they've got at they've got to find some way to bronco no matter how much it bucks.

And as to the "lot of ginned up former Ron Paul supporters." Well, yes, they won the straw poll, but with a fairly weak plurality and a lot of booing. Politico reports that only 2,935 (of approximately 10,000) attendees actually voted. If a 74-year-old loose cannon can't get more than 10 percent of the aggregate potential vote, I'd say he's more of an accident than a contender.

I would, however, like to know just what the booers have against him. I mean, I know what have against him, and what any sensible Republican might have against him, but neither of these datapoints is particularly relevant to the current inquiry. What, exactly, is the beef?